June 2015, Joyce Wrote:
Small town life in the 1940/50's: From Rationing to Polio
I was born May 1938 so in my 77 years I have lived through and seen many changes in this amazing country; most of them good but not all.  I’ve lived through 3 tornados in the Waukee area.  I lived through the end of the depression.  We always lived on a farm so enjoying adequate food was never a problem for my family as it was for a lot of people.  During the depression we went through all kinds of government rationing of things like gasoline, bread, sugar, and flour to name a few.  Mom made a lot of our clothes out of feed sacks.  Some were very pretty!  I thought Des Moines was only open on rainy days because we never went to town when we could work at home.
            Our phone was on a party line so we learned to share.  There was a telephone operator that gave a long ring for everyone to pick up for emergencies.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor there was always a threat that it could happen here.  If planes were spotted and not identified the phone operator would call us and tell us a Black-out was in affect so we would sit around in the dark.  I lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Fall of Saigon, the Bay of Pigs/ Cuban Missile Crisis, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Sputnik, Neil Armstrong's walking on the moon, the Challenger explosion, the Oklahoma City bombing, the flood of 1993, the 911 attacks, the first heart transplant, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the shooting of Ronald Reagan and, and the shootings at Columbine in Colorado.
 I have survived Polio, Measles, Mumps, Whooping Cough, and Chicken Pox; diseases we don’t worry about anymore thanks to many scientists like Jonas Salk.  Thanks to Dr. Castles, our local doctor for bringing me through Polio.  I think he came to our house about every day. In those days you only needed one doctor and he made house calls!
 Once television was invented it really cut back on families entertaining themselves and neighboring.  For example, we picked up corn left by the picker to sell to earn extra money to we help build the Dallas Center skating rink.  We used to spend many hours at the roller-skating rink in Dallas Center as our main entertainment.  It was great entertainment for the whole family.  The parents sat on the picnic tables and visited while the kids skated.  We even danced on that rink.
There have been lots of inventions over the years:  washer & dryers, electric stoves, furnaces, running water, bathrooms (in the house), refrigerators & freezers, tractors, milking machines, corn pickers, combines, automatic transmissions, power brakes, power steering, seat belts, air bags, computers, cell phones and GPS.  Tractors today are huge and pull 24 row planters. Combines and semi trucks to haul grain have speeded up farming and now there are very few small farmers left.
I intend to see much more, thanks to my pacemaker and two artificial knees.                                                            Joyce Button